Calendar Search fills yet another gap on Windows Phone

Here's something that you can't do on Windows Phone: search your calendar for past, current or future events.

Seems an odd omission, yet we'll chalk it up to the "we're too busy to add it in" pile along with the ability to add new contacts from Bing search. Speaking of, the developer who made Add to Contacts (and who also makes "I'm a WP7!") has a new app out that fixes that whole inability to search your Calendar events and it's straightforwardly called Calendar Search:

"Although your Windows Phone can connect and synchronize with all types of calendars, it’s impossible to search and take action on calendar meetings, appointments and events.

With Calendar Search, you can unlock the power of calendar searching, and search your meetings, event, and appointments, by date ranges, keywords, even specific accounts, and take action on this powerful information!"

We've been using it for the last few hours and it does what it says, no frills. In that sense, if you need this functionality and can't wait for Microsoft, the $0.99 for the app is well worth it. There's a free trial too and you can give it a go here in the Marketplace.

Calendar Search fills yet another gap on Windows Phone

Well, not really. This is only an app, inaccessible from within the Calendar had you been in there when you decided to initiate a search. This is a great app, but you can't compare it to the built-in functionality of other platforms.

If you want an app that replaces the UI and functionaility of the existing Windows Phone Calendar, there are good alternatives, like Agenda Live, but the goal of Calendar Search, like Add to Contacts, was to give you a powerful "missing feature" without forcing you to learn and use another full app, hope you love it!

Me, neither, but it's probably important to someone. I can definitely see how it didn't make the Mango features list, however. They have so much catching up to do as it is. They absolutely need to hire this guy. Hell, they need to hire a thousand of these guys and put out releases every 3 months. There's really no time to waste.

Excellent. I contacted this developer and asked that they make this specific app. Works very fast, but still needs the ability to enter multiple search terms and not just a search phrase. Also, needs ability to search entire calendar by turning off date filter.

@BCH, we knew everyone would want full calendar search, which is why we added the custom range, you can just add (almost) any start and end date to search for everything. We have added an "Entire Calendar" toggle in version 1.1 as well as support for mutiple search terms. Hope you love it!

Wow, this is nice. Noticing a lot of filling gaps lately. Making the phone more functional as needed. Main drawback: It seems the OS is losing its grip on an integrated system. With WP7 in my opinion more apps is not necessarily better. It is slowly feeling a like an iPhone where there's an app for everything. What I like about the WP7 OS that is the deep integration and main integration of many apps. With a loose app like calendar search, and perhaps others like it, is making the startscreen awfully crowded. It would be a good strategy of microsoft to buy these up and integrate them into the standard apps in an update or perhaps provide these developers special rewards for fixing gaps quickly into the main OS.

We totally agree, or give developers the ability to create these types of features with add ins, instead of full blown apps. But until then we hope these are the next best thing, which is why we give them such generic names, no splash screen, and mimic the OS look and feel...to make it "feel" integrated. We'll take some special rewards, though! :)

Should, of course, be in in-built app, but as pointed out by @Wevenhuis and @Codesmith it's hard to strike a balance between lots of separate apps to enhance built-ins, having some plug-in architecture or create a big 'does-it-all' app, á la, i.e., Agendus.

@conorn, you can essentially search for any event during any time range found on your calendar, that shows in your phone. By default, you have "Last 3 months, last 30 days, this month, next month, and next 3 months". If you want to search by ANY date range, just turn on "use custom range" and select any start and end date...it'll find it (as long as the event is not marked 'private'.
And yes, it uses the events that show on your calendar, on your device. In order to pull data from all your accounts without having your phone in sync, would require users to enter credentials for every account, bypassing the ease of setup. So, if it's on your phone, it can see it. :)

I'm curious how 'private' feature works. I had all my events set as private, and this app will not search events marked as such. If I uncheck the box across all my events, in what way may it compromise the calendar's privacy if at all?